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The Insights Team are one of the proactive sides of our services department. We look after the software and tools that assist our engineers in delivering an excellent service. We’re also tasked with ensuring that the essentials, such as antivirus software, patching, cloud based email and backups are delivered consistently and efficiently.

Being proactive means that we operate outside of the regular service desk environment, where the focus is naturally on reacting to, and resolving issues when they arise. We’re busy behind the scenes looking at how we can prevent the issue from occurring in the first place.

When our service desk processes a support ticket, they will gather as much relevant information as possible. This is not only important in providing a timely resolution, but it assists us greatly in building a better picture of the challenges our clients are facing.

Using our business intelligence tools, we perform regular reviews of the tickets we’ve handled recently. This enables us to identify trends and potential pain points, with a view to providing a solution to the root cause, rather than just the symptoms. If we see that 90% of a client’s tickets relate to failed backups, or there’s a spike in tickets relating to the wireless network, we’ll be asking why. This helps us to provide a truly proactive service. Using this intelligence, we can work with other areas of the business to provide long term solutions, reducing the number of support tickets that the client has to open.

Another area that’s constantly on our radar is efficiency. We’re always looking at better ways to carry out common tasks, which in turn leads to quicker resolution times for our clients. This can range from defining tried and tested processes for our engineers, to scripting the entire solution. Having spent a number of years on the service desk myself, I’m aware that time is limited for developing longer term efficiency savings ‘on the fly’. The priority has to be resolving live issues. The Insights Services team is ideally placed to take on these tasks.

Also hard at work in the background is our Remote Management and Monitoring (RMM) software. This is busy detecting unpredictable issues as they arise, such as hardware failures and offline servers. The fine tuning of this system is an ever evolving task for the Insights Services team. We constantly look at ways of automatically healing issues that are detected, meaning there is a resolution long before the end user is affected.

Another important part of our work in Insights Services is carrying out regular reviews of the software and systems we deploy. In a fast paced industry, it’s essential to make sure we’re benchmarking our current packages against alternative offerings. By the same token, we’re always on the lookout for changes, or news within the industry which may affect our clients, such as a recently discovered security threat.

Working within Insights Services is a rewarding role. The changes we make are often subtle, however the benefits can be widespread.

If you were ever to make the journey down to the Select Technology office, as you walked through the door, you would be greeted by a wall that spells out our guiding principles as a business.

One of these values relates to Innovation. We believe that to be the best organisation we can be, we owe it to our customers to be continually improving. Looking at what we do and how we do it and changing where needed to ensure that we continue to be successful.

Innovation is an interesting concept. Some organisations seem to think that Innovation means change for changes’ sake. Some believe that Innovation and change are essential and will embrace change at any cost. While these viewpoints both have merit, most organisations choose to exist somewhere in the middle, keen to embrace the positive benefits of change but wary of breaking something that is fundamental to the success of their business.

Change, for good or for bad, should in my opinion always be embraced. Meaningful analysis of the impact of specific changes can help highlight the benefits and mitigate the risks. A thorough understanding of what works well within your business (possibly by embracing critical analysis of your business using tools such as Power BI) will help you gravitate toward changes that are positive by nature.

The reality today is that change is a constant. The digital economy means that, no matter how fast we run or how hard we work, someone will always have just worked out a more efficient, more streamlined way to do something, think of Blockbuster & Netflix or Text Vs. Instant Messaging.

Innovation in business can be tough. Wouldn’t we all love the time to be able to stop what we are doing for long enough to be able to analyse WHY we are doing it. However, to ensure that we are always at the forefront of our industry, this is exactly what we must do. We are genuinely seeing the death of “but that’s the way we have always done it.” Sure, there are organisations that believe that is right and will continue to say it, unfortunately for most organisations that think this way the clock is ticking.

Let’s look again at Blockbuster Video. In 1997, when Netflix was formed, Blockbuster was worth $8.4BN. They were utterly convinced that their way was the best way forward. They believed in it so completely and were so resistant to change that when, in 2000, when Netflix approached them about a merger (Reed Hastings was asking for only $50M for Netflix to become part of the Blockbuster business) they sent the internet upstart packing. The rest, as they say, is history. Netflix is now worth $65BN, at the time of it’s demise in 2010, Blockbuster was worth only $24m. Blockbuster did launch its own online streaming service, but by 2006 when it was launched, Netflix already had almost 10 years of experience in the market and Blockbuster just couldn’t compete.

We all owe it to ourselves to continue to have an open mind about how things can be done differently. That organisation that comes to you and tells you they have a new way of doing things should at least be listened to. It might not be the right way for you to go forward but no longer can we simply dismiss these approaches as we have done in the past. That is exactly what Blockbuster did.

I thought it would be a good opportunity to follow up and put a bit more context surrounding this concept and ultimately what makes us different here at Select Technology. Those who know me will know that I love a good metaphor, after all, in an often overly complicated world; it is a great way to simplify things and help re-frame people’s perspectives. So here goes:

Support with no proactivity is like a team sitting in a leaky boat, a vicious cycle of continually bailing out water with seemingly no time to fix the holes while randomly drifting along with no plan for the direction of the boat or its desired destination.

Dissecting this metaphor and applying it in the context of the real world IT Support looks like this:

Think of the boat representing a support company’s clients

The people are the support team

The holes are clients risks and support exposure

The incoming water is the relentless incoming support

And the boat direction/destination is support strategy.

Of course in this situation any thought regarding proactivity is hampered by the relentless incoming water, the boat is therefore slow to move forward and reach its desired destination and the people are caught in a vicious cycle.

Whether in-house or outsourced, in IT there is always a degree of reactive time but most people would agree that not enough proactive time is available which just isn’t good for the business.

The value of our service is not judged by how many times you call us for help or how fast we react when you do – it’s actually about how we reduce risk and improve your business through our unique processes. After all, when you call for support it’s because technology is limiting your business rather than complementing it.

We are different at Select Technology. Alongside our busy Helpdesk – we have dedicated teams and unique processes designed to continuously look after our clients proactively resulting in better results.

We have teams whose sole purpose is to find those holes in the boat and devise strategies to remove or reduce them

We have teams who spend scheduled time onsite regularly reviewing our clients infrastructure against our best practices to ensure risks are mitigated

We have Leadership teams who meet with our clients quarterly to have business discussions and how technology can help achieve their business goals.

Our unique approach brings stronger and more predictable results, which fundamentally reduces business risk meaning we enjoy relationships that are more positive with our clients. For us it’s about positive actions which lead us all to positive results.

Documentation is a vital part of what we do as a Managed IT Service Provider. Customer intelligence is finding out things like how customers use applications, their experiences, and personal preferences – whilst ensuring that we can easily access the information in a secure manner.

Good documentation makes the entire process of providing support services more fluid and this translates into a more efficient and positive support experience for our clients. Everything from new hardware and software configuration detail to 3rd party usernames and passwords are all centrally recorded which gives us the best platform to provide a great customer experience.

Good documentation is the base upon which 1st class customer service is built. It enables reactive situations to set the stage for proactive “Wow’s”, and it bolsters a team culture by making sure team members have the tools necessary to address customer concerns as effectively as possible.

We use a secure and agile cloud based solution which allows us to access all documentation relating to our customers using the internet. This means that we have access to our full repository of information where ever we go.

Our documentation is effectivity in one location and fully integrates with our Service Desk system. All documentation is easily searchable via company, assets, hardware, software and known fixes to issues, this intuitiveness alone makes us more efficient.

All documentation is stored securely requiring multi factor authentication, which ensures that the data can only be accessed by authorised staff.

The system we use has the powerful capability to link documents to equipment, hardware, software, vendor, known fixes and more. Linking enables us to easily identify which pre and post steps are necessary to complete a job at hand which may not have been known until the linked documents is seen. This intelligence evolves over time as we use the system linking becomes mature which benefits all our technical team.

As a Senior Support Engineer, being passionate about good documentation is a must, as it not only makes my life easier but it directly translates to a positive outcome too. After all, good documentation is an investment in future efficiency.

Rob Haggerty joined Select Technology in 2016 as Senior Engineer and has become an integral member of the team. Rob is responsible for infrastructure and server related tickets as well as escalations from the junior team. Rob blends great technical skills with soft skills, perfect attributes for a customer facing support role. Rob’s passion for service excellence drives his dedication to continually help us improve all areas of the business including developing our documentation solution.

Providing Managed Support services to multiple clients all with varying levels of IT needs provides us with different challenges every day. On a regular basis we have to deal with an array of issues and requests ranging from Cyber Security threats to password resets.

Whilst we endeavour to resolve our client’s issues beyond their expectations, how do we truly know if we have happy clients?

Historically we would have regular calls and client meetings, along with periodic lengthy satisfaction surveys. Whilst this did provide valuable feedback, it was too infrequent and denied us the opportunity to act immediately. In addition, more often than not, we were engaging with senior management which resulted in disjointed and sometimes historic feedback which frequently created a chain of miss-interpretation.

We were clearly missing a very important part of the puzzle… the staff themselves!

In order for us to be fully in tune with the client sentiment, we realised we had to understand how the staff were feeling about their Service experience. We realised that by getting agile feedback from everyone who consumed the service first-hand was crucial to our success.

To address this, we implemented an intuitive simple pulse survey tool called CrewHu. So how does it work? It’s really simple, as soon as a support ticket is completed, CrewHu will email the client with the most important question “How did we do on this request?” And the best bit? To submit feedback it’s just “one click” on one of the faces.

Once feedback is submitted, we can very quickly gain an insight into how we performed on a specific issue, for a specific person. In addition, there is opportunity to provide further written feedback if a client so wishes, although this is optional!

CrewHu will send out real-time alerts to the right people when someone has left a rating. Our team will quickly follow up to deal with the situation where a client isn’t 100% happy. This rapid interaction allows us to be responsive with addressing any concerns and helps us improve our client relationships.

So why is feedback so important to us? Simple. Our continued success relies on delighted clients, and so feedback is an integral part of our improvement cycle.

The beauty of such a simple and effortless feedback system is that it encourages more people to use it which gives us a greater and broader insight into service trends which leads to improvements such as process enhancements and even helping us identify training opportunities. Feedback is a key ingredient for us and means we are always listening to our clients which in turn shapes the future services we provide.

We’re proud that we consistently achieve higher than average positive feedback and that’s why we publish our feedback live:

Our consistently great feedback is due to our dedication and commitment, we constantly challenge ourselves pushing the boundaries, driving innovation leading to service improvements all built on the foundations of this crucial feedback from our clients. And not forgetting our Services team who are fundamental and committed to delivering service excellence and helping our clients make sure their businesses run smoothly with reliable and efficient IT Systems.

Written by Nick Potter, Director at Select Technology – Nick began his career at Select Technology in 1998 as a network engineer. His ability to develop long-term client relationships prompted a switch to client management, using his technical skills to align technology with positive business outcomes. Nick is integral to the leadership team, but still lends his expertise to this vital strategic planning role.

Every day starts with a management Service Desk review where I can determine the health of the Service Desk. Real-time data on our Service Dashboards gives me a quick insight into everything that is happening so I can gauge the current climate, and make informed decisions and allocate appropriate resources. The morning is often spent making plans with the team, and helping with their next actions on sticky support issues. The Service Desk health is carefully monitored throughout the day to ensure we are progressing through the workload efficiently. We know what our end target is every day, so if we are not within acceptable thresholds we’ll quickly make a plan to rectify. As you can imagine, it is critical we end the day in a good place because with Support it’s a certainty that more tickets will come in the next day adding to the previous day’s unresolved total, so if we aren’t on top of our tickets on a daily basis, our workload could quickly become unsustainable.

Constantly reviewing and improving the quality and efficiency of the team, to ensure we always deliver an excellent Service, is the top priority. Traditional support is naturally very reactive, which means every day is different and it can be hard to predict how much capacity each team member has at any given moment, it only takes one major unexpected support ticket to impact everyone’s day. A big part of my role is working with our processes, products and people to develop new and improved ways of working to reduce the amount of reactive support we do; a more proactive approach helps us gain control over the quantity of reactive support we have to deal with. We are currently in the process of implementing new delivery areas within the services team to focus on ways we can effectively reduce the number of reactive tickets that are logged which will result in providing our customers with an enhanced end user experience.

Using our business intelligence data tools, part of the proactive teams role is to look for patterns and recurring issues and to ask the philosophical question “knowing what we know now, what could we have done to stop this ticket being logged?”. This is an important question that can lead us down a few different avenues. For repeated issues, one of three conclusions could be drawn; either a configuration change is required or perhaps a new product or service might be needed, or there is a training requirement for us to manage. Sometimes we may develop self-healing automation processes which, after sufficient testing, could be rolled out as a preventative measure to all our managed devices giving all our clients the benefits of our proactive work. All of this positive effort helps improve our knowledge and efficiency within the services team, ultimately resulting in an enhanced end user experience to all our customers.

Our latest investment in the team involves a concept called “Gamification”. We have had pulse feedback solutions in place for a while where clients can click happy or sad on every completed ticket, however, we have updated our system to include Gamification where the guys get points for every positive feedback they get, a natural evolution in my eyes. We are at the stage of developing rewards for the team and they’ve come up with some great ideas so far. Very simply, points accrued can be saved up and exchanged for rewards of their choosing. Ideas we have so far range from free lunches, 2 hour lunch breaks to various gadgets. I am really excited by this addition, and how it will add an extra dynamic for encouraging and rewarding the team.

So to summarise, my role at Select Technology is varied, often fast paced and very rewarding. Of course as part of my role to continually strive to improve our service, I’m always keen to hear from our clients first-hand about their experience of our Service, and I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to drop me a line anytime.

Written by Chris Malyon Chris joined Select Technology in 2011 as 3rd line engineer and is now responsible for all Service Delivery. He has a talent to grasp new concepts quickly and masters technical detail.

Having spent the last 10 years working in the IT Services sector, I have seen first-hand the transformation of the Managed Services Provider or the MSP as we are commonly known.

Back in the early 2000’s, IT Support was very much based around maintenance contracts with a break/fix approach. Customer satisfaction was largely based on how quickly an IT company could respond and fix a reactive issue and these reactive issues were simply billed in time and materials. Looking back, this was quite a negative service because the IT Company benefited from the clients misfortune and with no commitment very little incentive to be preventative. Something had to change.

A few years later we saw the emergence of the Managed Service Provider (MSP) and the Service proposition became very different. Managed Services are typically designed around delivering a fully unlimited managed service for an all-inclusive fee. This became desirable to clients because for a simple flat fee everything was taken care of and it was easy to budget for too. This “all you can eat” model changed the dynamics of IT Service Delivery because no longer did the MSP make money from the clients misfortune (like in the break/fix model), but now with an “unlimited service”, downtime became mutually painful for both parties, after all, the risks were now mutual.

This change in dynamic was the catalyst which forced MSP’s to re-think their proposition and this led to a need for the service to be more proactive which has defined the modern day MSP. MSP’s had to get more proactive thus reducing risk for both themselves and the client with added benefit of becoming more efficient, reducing risk and increasing service quality. This led to the introduction of more intelligent IT tools which could monitor infrastructure so small issues could be detected mitigating the risk of a major outage. The trouble is, even though the monitoring software may well prevent a bigger issue emerging later, if you weren’t expecting an alert from the monitoring software, this is still by definition ‘reactive’ time.

So fast forward to today and where are we? The Managed Services model continues to evolve and while new ingredients are added to the MSP services, the same goal is always there – to increase the quality of service and also the efficiency.

MSP’s are having to keep innovating to offer the best service whilst still remaining competitive. As a result, smaller MSP’s can suffer from a lack of resource and require their techs to “wear multiple hats” which can be the enemy of true proactivity. As a busy MSP it’s all too easy for tech’s to get pulled into the reactive support vacuum.

But, to be truly proactive, we believe the answer is dedicated delivery areas outside of a reactive support desk. This very structure allows us to provide a sustainable proactive service to our clients and this key differentiator sets us apart from an average MSP.

We have “Behind the scenes” delivery areas driving efficiency, preventing issues through best practices and processes. Our best practices are distilled from all the collective technical brilliance across our Senior Techs. Using this super database, we have scheduled proactive time on our clients infrastructure, leaving no stone unturned and comparing our findings against these best practices. We meet quarterly with your leaders and discuss your business not just statistics showing that we are delivering the service we said we would.

Although having more delivery areas making up the Service could mean a higher entrance fee, the benefits of being part of this far out weight the costs. Paying less for a reactive service is not going to help your business.

When an MSP becomes truly proactive not only will the client see the benefits through increased reliability and greater productivity while enjoying less reactive tickets and less business risk.

So we can conclude that not calling your IT Company is better value for your business.

Written by Simon Moore, Technical Services Director – With 20 Years’ experience in technical roles, including the investment banking sector, Simon combines and obsession for customer service excellence with a passion for technology. Since joining Select Technology in 2006 he has transformed our services business and now focus his time on the strategic direction and leadership.

Over the past 2 weeks, I have been undertaking a wide range of customer activities based around GDPR. Here at Select Technology we have held a GDPR Breakfast Briefing, a Webinar and numerous face-to-face workshops with our customer base, all offered free of charge.

We have done this for many reasons, sure, there is the potential for income based on enhanced services to help customers prepare for the GDPR (something we should all be honest and transparent about,) however our main reason for these activities is to deliver one overriding message;

Don’t Panic!

My view of the GDPR opposes a lot of the alarmist nonsense that has been propagated by many organisations looking exploit fear and doubt in the mind of potential customer, in the hope of scaring them in buying.

But…

The GDPR is genuinely nothing to be scared of. It is, in fact, a great opportunity to develop a framework to fix the things we all know are wrong with our businesses.

At the core of the GDPR is a single concept, Accountability, NOT compliance. Compliance will come but it will be because of this accountability. Accountability based on good process.

We all have those things we don’t like about the way we do business. No one seems to know where they come from but they have somehow become issues that many of us think are just too difficult to address.

Whether it is the pile of boxes full of unindexed files in the corner (that keeps growing!) The shared drive that continues to swell despite being only 5% business documentation and 95% pictures of a cat you think belonged to someone who left in 2009. Or thatpart of thatprocess, you know thatone. It’s too hard, so we just don’t bother with it.

This is where the GDPR comes in.

The path to the GDPR drives us to look at processes within our businesses and think about the impact they have on what we do, the information we manage and how to recognise and mitigate process failure. So, if you need the motivation to address the pile of boxes or the cat pictures, GDPR gives us just that. It represents a rare opportunity for us all to align our entire business and work toward a common cause (and we all know how hard that can be!)

The technology exists to make any journey to the GDPR simple, straightforward and logical. The only thing most organisations lack is the will and enthusiasm to embrace that technology and begin that journey.

Good process, the right technology and an open mind transforms GDPR from the scary legislative minefield you may have been told it is into the most powerful, collective workplace transformation opportunity in a decade. I for one intend to embrace it and help as many customers as I can do the same.

Written by Marcus Naris, Sales Manager at Select Technology – Marcus is a former pre-sales Solutions Specialist at Microsoft and is passionate about helping customers understand that there is usually a better way of doing things, and that change in all its forms, should be embraced.

Now you might well think that this is going to be one of those come-speak-to-Select-Technology-because-we-are-the-best-in-the-world kind of blogs…

I really want to be open and honest here, and say that there are probably plenty of good IT companies out there. I say “probably” because, in all fairness, we stopped researching the competition.

We stopped trying to be like everyone else.

We no longer look at pricing. We know we’re at the higher end of the IT support market, but that’s a good thing because it gives us the headroom to properly support our customers and provide outstanding customer service.

This definitely bares repeating: We can properly support our customers and provide outstanding customer service.

And, when we stopped worrying about being like every other support company we began to really understand what it takes to be different.

There’s no reason to compare our services to any other IT support company out there because the bottom line is that no-one else can be like us, we have a team of people who are dedicated to our core values.

Our services are simply designed with one thing in mind:

Will this solve your problem?

This does often present us with some problems, because when we are up against a so-called competitor in a new business situation our potential new clients get very confused because they are looking for a like-for-like comparison.

But this also plays in our favour time and time again because it allows us to explain, and for you to see how we really do things differently from others.

This is why it really pays for us as an IT support company to be innovative and constantly develop new and better services.

Talk to us today and find out how Select Technology can solve the challenges you face as technology in business evolves.

With the recent hullabaloo surrounding last week’s AWS S3 outage, some of you may be wondering if cloud migration is an appropriate next step for your business.

We are major cloud evangelists at Select Technology, but we absolutely acknowledge that things can go wrong when moving your business to the cloud in the absence of understanding and correct planning.

Despite its perceived imperfections, some level of cloud migration will benefit your business in almost all cases.

We’re going to look at steps you can take to avoid the pitfalls of cloud migration and ensure your business gets the most out of this amazing technology.

1. Know What You Need

Take a moment to think about what kind of demands will be placed on your connection.

Is your business seasonal or marketing-driven, with surges of traffic based on public holidays or marketing campaigns?

One of the amazing features of public cloud services – especially with a platform like Microsoft Azure – is automation or auto-scaling.

If you can anticipate when your periods of highest demand will be, your cloud service will automatically activate appropriate computing resources during those times.

On the other hand, do you need consistently high bandwidth for live streaming video or hosting VoIP calls with clients and partners?

If so, you might be better off using a private cloud setup that requires less automation.

Cloud computing is a very, very general term, covering literally hundreds of different services.

Taking the time to think about exactly what your business needs will help you reap the fullest benefits of cloud migration, while ensuring you’re not paying for anything you don’t need.

2. Test Before Going Live

Test, test, test before deployment!

Storing data and setting up automation in Azure and other cloud services is a relatively simple affair.

One of the biggest pitfalls of cloud migration lies not in moving your data, but in making sure your applications perform as expected once shifted up into the cloud.

The way your apps operate on-site gives little indication as to how they will act off-premise.

This point overlaps with our next one because it is so important to remember that cloud migration for businesses is often a step-by-step process.

Moving your business into the cloud one workload at a time will give you the feedback you need to anticipate all eventualities before they have the chance to affect your business.

Pre-deployment testing of this sort is best performed by someone with the relevant experience and foresight, so we highly recommend seeking advice externally if your business lacks the skillset in-house.

3. Take Your Cloud Migration Step by Step

The point about testing is a crucial one that illustrates the importance of taking one step at a time.

Running before you can walk, so to speak, will give you far less agility. If you rush to shift your apps up to the cloud, then you will have no idea how they will operate when push comes to shove.

Cloud services are quickly becoming a business necessity but don’t worry if your competitors beat you there.

Performing your cloud migration in a step-by-step fashion will also provide a betting understanding of which services you require.

You may find that some workloads are better off remaining on-site or even automated to reduce costs.

You won’t know unless you take the time to find out!

4. Pay Attention to Security and Regulation

Every workload you move to the cloud should be thoroughly scrutinized to ensure your business’ security requirements are met.

Are you storing sensitive client data or other confidential information such as health or financial records?

GDPR is changing the way data is handled, so keeping your business compliant should be a vitally important part of your cloud migration strategy.

The security of your data, applications, and identities is well protected with Microsoft Azure Security.

“Security and privacy are built right into the Azure platform, beginning with the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) that addresses security at every development phase from initial planning to launch, and Azure is continually updated to make it even more secure. Operational Security Assurance (OSA) builds on SDL knowledge and processes to provide a framework that helps ensure secure operations throughout the lifecycle of cloud-based services. Azure Security Center makes Azure the only public cloud platform to offer continuous security-health monitoring.” – Azure Security

5. Choose the Right Cloud Partner

It is highly recommended that you seek to a managed IT services provider to identify what kind of cloud infrastructure is the best fit for your business.

Those of you who have already figured out what you need will likely also know which environment you want to run; Azure, HPE Helion, AWS, etc.

Be sure to plan ahead with your prospective provider so you can be sure they will be capable of supporting the full functionality your cloud infrastructure as it scales up.

At Select Technology we can look at and simplify your cloud requirements from a business perspective.

Call us today to talk to better understand cloud migration and your place on the modern technological landscape.